On Mon, 19 May 1997, Koen Holtman wrote:
> Jeffrey Mogul:
> >HTTP is for computers to talk to each other, not for humans.
> >
> >Koen and others want human users to be able to specify feature
> >tags. Fine; just introduce a map between a set of human-sensible,
> >internationalized names, and the enumerated set of feature tags.
> >This map could be implementation specific, or it could be
> >standardized *independent of HTTP*, to make service-authoring
> >tools more portable. But the purpose of this map is to cleanly
> >separate what computers do and what humans do.
Such mappings have existed for a long time. One of them is called
us-ascii :-). Its most widely usable internationalized version is
called UTF-8.
> I don't like the idea of requiring the use of a mapping tool to make
> things author-friendly. That is no way to bootstrap a new
> technology.
Well, the mapping tools are already available; they are called
text editors or so :-).
Regards, Martin.